LaTasha Gary, HP’s Director of Sustainable Impact Program Management and Digital Transformation, on her long career at HP and role helping the company meet its sustainable impact goals.
WHEN LATASHA GARY was a teen in the rural community of LaMarque, Texas, in the 1980s, her high school had just a single computer shared among more than 1,000 students. Gaining access to that computer— even on rare occasions—opened up new possibilities for Gary, who had an aptitude for math and science from an early age. “We would rotate using the computer to do whatever little bit of programming we had learned,” she recalls.
At a time when there were few women in STEM fields and fewer who were Black, even the “village” of teachers and mentors who helped spur her toward an engineering degree at Texas A&M University (where just a tiny percentage of the student population was Black) and a graduate degree at Howard University couldn’t have predicted the success she’d have in her more than 35-year tech career.
For most of her three-plus decades at HP, Gary has held senior leadership positions in the IT organization. Before taking on her most recent role as Director of the Sustainable Impact Program Management Office, she oversaw business planning for cybersecurity and served as the business planning manager for then-Chief Information Security Officer Jack Clark and, after he retired, Joanna Burkey.
Gary’s career took a different turn in 2020, when the murder of George Floyd touched off an overdue reckoning around systemic racism in the United States, including corporate America. As a founding leader of one of HP’s Racial Equality and Social Justice Task Force pillars, she found her work and personal experiences converging in an unanticipated way.
Gary decided to go after an opportunity that she saw could have lasting impact as HP (and many other companies) pledged to increase their spend with Black and African American suppliers and increase their representation of Black and African American employees and leaders. In addition to its goals around digital equity, climate action, and human rights, HP pledged to double the number of Black and African American executives by 2025 and achieve 50/50 gender equality in HP leadership by 2030. HP also committed to staffing more than 30% of technical and engineering positions with women by 2030. As of October 2022, women represented 23.7% of engineering and technology positions globally, and the number of Black and African Americans in technical positions increased to 3.1%, up from 2.3% in 2020.
Innovation sat down with Gary to discuss how she’s helping HP get closer to attaining those goals
1/Describe your role today and what prompted you to make the switch?
I have been supporting DEI initiatives since becoming a manager at HP, including recruiting at HBCUs and sponsoring the Houston Black Employee Network group. I am very passionate about DEI. It just became a no-brainer for me to take my IT skills, my program management skills, and go for this particular opportunity in Sustainable Impact. Today, I lead the Program Management Office to help HP reach its Sustainable Impact goals—allocating budget for initiatives with HP partners that extend our reach to new populations (such as NABU and the Digital Equity Accelerator), and tracking the effectiveness and impact of those programs.
2/How does HP assure we’re holding ourselves accountable and we’re progressing?
We want to make sure that if we say we’re going to achieve a goal, whether it’s by 2025 or 2030, there is a path to get to that particular goal. We’re not just saying something and hoping that it happens, but ensuring that we are actually doing the work to get there. The Project Management Office is responsible for working with each of the goal owners to have a “glide path” with milestones and deliverables we track throughout the year.
LaTasha Gary
Director of Sustainable Impact Program Management and Digital Transformation
3/How does that break down in practice?
We have pillar leads for digital equity, climate action, and human rights who work across HP to drive progress toward our goals. They help us work with goal owners and subjectmatter experts to ensure they have programs and plans in place to achieve their respective glide paths for the current year’s and future years’ goals. A quarterly report on our toptier public goals is shared with leadership, including the Sustainable Impact Steering Committee, top executives reporting to CEO Enrique Lores, and the Nominating, Governance, and Social Responsibility Committee (NGSRC) from HP’s Board of Directors.
4/Why is transparency increasingly important around sustainability reporting?
Customers, investors, employees, and regulators want to know what we are doing to improve the planet, people, and communities we serve. We have a bold vision to be the world’s most sustainable and just technology company. To achieve our goals, we have to make sure that we’re providing documentation that substantiates our achievements and shows progress. In some cases, depending on the type of goal, we have external auditors to make sure we are accurately reporting and not greenwashing. New regulatory requirements are being defined now that will require us to report our sustainability metrics alongside our financial statements.
5/You had the opportunity to take early retirement but declined, even after all your years of service and accomplishments. What motivates you to keep pushing forward at HP?
I wasn’t at the point where I was ready to hand this off. I think HP has made significant progress over the time that I’ve been at the company, but we’re not ready to celebrate yet. There’s more work to do, more opportunities to address. I’ve been pleased with the progress we’ve made together, and it motivates me to stay on and continue to lead out on the changes that we need.